Thanks to an award from the Dave Matthews Band Bama Works Fund, even more writers, composers and visual artists from the Charlottesville area will be able to join one of the largest artist communities in the nation: VCCA. Last year, the residencies of fourteen local artists were partially subsidized by the Bama Works Fund in CACF (Charlottesville Area Community Foundation) grant. They included Sharon Shapiro, Anne Carley, Ashley Florence, Amy Hereford, Mary Alice Hostetter, Rebecca Lily, Wendy Gavin Porter, Mark H. Saunders, Judith Shatin, James Wallenstein and James Wiznerowicz. The next application deadline is September 15, 2010. To apply, follow this link: http://www.vcca.com/main/apply

We're planning the 2011 season at the VCCA's Moulin à Nef studio center in Auvillar, France, and we'd love to hear your proposals for Auvillar Arts Workshops. Unlike our residency programs, these workshops are open to the public. We hope that their success will help us keep the Moulin à Nef studio center fiscally viable, so that we can make our residency program there more affordable. Visit http://www.vcca.com to see the workshops we offered this summer. We've had wonderful feedback from the May workshop, “O Taste and See: Writing the Senses in Deep France,” with poet Marilyn Kallet. Marilyn teamed up with Christophe Gardner to offer photography and cooking demonstrations as part of her writing workshop, and the participants loved both. We have two more workshops booked for later this season: Painting in Southwest France and Writing en Plein Air. (Unfortunately, the Storytelling workshop has been canceled.) In this economy, it can be difficult to fill a work